E-mail Still King
When it comes to sharing bit and pieces of information and data in our computer connected world, according to this post on www.gigaom.com, e-mail is still far and away the primary way people do it [Ctrl+Click to open in a new Tab].
The pie chart at right, found in the post at the link above, shows that e-mail is still the primary tool used to share computer-based information.
E-mail was basically the first way used to share information between computer users on the Internet. The working e-mail model goes back to around the mid 60s (1960s) when very basic e-mail was used on true mainframe computers (which are all but extinct now). There were no attachments, no proportionally spaced fonts (all fonts were horrid ugly mono-spaced fonts like this), no automatic numbered lists, no underlining, no bolding, no colours, etc.
E-mail started to get smarter and more useful as the Internet started to come into being for the general populace around the early 80s (1980s). Ways were worked out (using tools like UUEncode and UUDecode) to send binary files as text so that attachments could be sent as part of the e-mail.
E-mail came way before the Web. E-mail was around in the days when we (well I did anyway) used tools called Archie, Veronica, and Gopher to find information on the Internet and there was no such thing as hyperlinking; and certainly no World Wide Web (WWW or Web).
The technology behind e-mail has changed a lot. Binary attachments such as pictures, Word files, Excel files, and videos, etc., are now common and do not need to be UUEncoded to be attached. Almost all e-mail clients support proportionally spaced fonts, bolding, underlining, points, bullets, indenting, colours, and all manner of useful formatting capabilities.
Many Web-based mail clients don’t include these rich text and formatting attributes or support them very well, but that is a whole other story.
Another point worth making—that will significantly change the pie chart—is that the chart above does not factor in corporate and business use of e-mail.
Within companies and businesses zero (or very close to zero) computer-based data is shared using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or Digg. Based on shared instances (and not on volumes) probably something like 80 percent of electronic data sharing within a company is still done using e-mail, about 10 percent using shared network drives, and the remaining 10 percent using “other”. When you take this into account the pie would look more like this one.
So, no matter how you spin it, e-mail is still king.
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